An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
